Celia Hart comes from a family of veteran Cuban revolutionaries who fought
against the Batista dictatorship together with Fidel Castro. Celia Hart has been
an outspoken defender of the political and revolutionary heritage of Leon
Trotsky. Her recent articles on this subject have been published by the Spanish
Marxist website El Militante and also
on Marxist.com and have provoked an intense debate on the question of Trotsky
internationally. Here she describes her political evolution.

Some brief biographical notes

Celia Hart with Alan Woods

Celia Hart comes from a family of veteran Cuban revolutionaries who fought
against the Batista dictatorship together with Fidel Castro. Celia Hart has been
an outspoken defender of the political and revolutionary heritage of Leon
Trotsky. Her recent articles on this subject, which have been published by the
Spanish Marxist website El Militante and also on Marxist.com have provoked an
intense debate on the question of Trotsky internationally.

Celia Hart was born in January 1963, just a few months after the Cuban
missile crisis. Her mother, Haydée Santamar�a, (“the most extraordinary
person I have ever known”) was a revolutionary from the very early days, and
participated together with Fidel Castro in the famous storming of the Moncada
barracks, where she lost both her brother and her boyfriend.

Armando Hart, her father, began his political activities by a different
route. In the dark days of the Batista dictatorship, when, as a young lawyer, he
commenced his political agitation and became a student leader in the University.
He was a member of the National Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Nacional
Revolucionario) led by Garc�a Barcena, a university professor who opposed
Batista and was imprisoned even before the assault on the Moncada barracks.

Armando Hart and Haydée Santamar�a were dedicated to the revolutionary
cause and fought together with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. When Batista was
finally overthrown, Armando was made the first Minister of Education of the
Revolution and Haydée Santamar�a was made President of La Casa de las
Américas (the House of the Americas), which she in effect founded.

Haydée was always opposed to “sovietization” – that is to the attempt
to impose rigid Stalinist bureaucracy and dogmatic thought and methodology on
Cuba. In La Casa de las Américas there was no room for either dogmatism or
so-called socialist realism. She ran it together with a real galaxy of talent:
Benedetti, Galich, Mariano Rodr�guez and others. Tragically, she committed
suicide in 1980. For his part, Armando Hart had a brilliant intellectual career,
and at the present time, after more than twenty years as Cuban Minister of
Culture, is in charge of the Oficina del Programa Martiano.

Celia comments: “I therefore grew up in the eye of the hurricane, between
the tremendous passion of my mother and the intelligence and devotion to study
of my father – both of them firmly inserted in the political life of Cuba.”
In 1980, one month before her mother’s suicide, Celia decided to study physics
in Havana University. Two years later she was sent to finish her studies in the
University of Dresden in the German Democratic Republic.

“I continued my studies until graduating in 1987 – the first foreign
female to graduate in this Faculty. I then returned to Havana, where I worked
until one year ago in the University, publishing approximately 15 specialist
works on magnetism and superconductivity. I also participated in about half a
dozen congresses in Italy, Brazil and Argentina…

"In 2004 I was supposed to have finished my Doctorate in Physics, but as
I was putting the final touches to a work on Philosophy, as part of my Doctorate
I realized that my great love forPphysics was not an end in itself, but only a
means to an end.”

Celia continues: “During my stay in the German Democratic Republic, I
realized that there was a contradiction between the inevitability of Socialism
to fight for a better world and the bureaucracy, the suffocating of all
initiative and the apathy that I found in that country, in spite of the good
living conditions. I was repelled by the excessive images of Honecker that one
found in every shop window.

"In 1985 I returned to Cuba on holidays and confessed to my father my
feelings of utter desperation. In response, my father opened a cupboard and got
out four books: the three-volume Life of Trotsky by Isaac Deutscher and
Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed. I devoured these books, but until a
few months ago had no opportunity of reading the rest of Trotsky’s works.”

“From that time,” continues Celia, “everything began to fall into place
like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I understood how the Russian Revolution –
and not only the Russian Revolution – had been betrayed and millions of
comrades had been deceived.”

However, none of Celia’s works have so far been published, except a
prologue to a book written by her mother entitled Haydée Speaks about the
Moncada (Haydée habla del Moncada). But lately, several of her writings
have been published in the website of El Militante and Marxist.com and the
Spanish magazine Marxismo Hoy.

"I have just returned after attending the International Conference of
the Marxist tendency. It was a very important experience for me. I met some
marvellous comrades from Pakistan, Israel, Spain, the United States... And I see
that I am not alone, that the same ideas I defend are spreading all over the
world. These are the ideas of the future. I thank all the comrades for the
happiest summer of my life.

“A new and exciting chapter is opening for me. It is a very strange
feeling. Less than a year ago I was a researcher in Physics in the University of
Havana. Now I do not know what the future holds. But I do understand that
science, and the scientific method, is the best method with which to carry out
this passionate revolutionary struggle.”